From How to Hire A-Players www.howtohireaplayers.com by Eric Herrenkohl

Endorsed by Michael Gerber author of The E-Myth and The Most Successful Small Business in the World

First of all, put together an interview scorecard for the position for which you are hiring. It should outline what an A-player looks like for the position for which you are hiring. Your scorecard might have 5 criteria, it might have 13. These criteria could range from competencies like “Proven Leader” and “Proven Quality Control Abilities” to “Strong Sense of Urgency” and “Excellent Personal Customer Service Abilities.” When you get others in your organization involved in creating such a scorecard, you will be amazed at how much disagreement there is over the profile. If you all can’t agree on what an A-player looks like, your chances of hiring one are pretty small.

As part of this exercise, I like to customize an on-line personnel assessment that matches the scorecard. In addition to asking candidates interview questions, we can provide them with an on-line test that compares their results to the scorecard for the role. These test results help to reveal weaknesses in candidates that may not be immediately evident from interview questions. We usually test candidates after the first round of interviews but before the final interviews. That way, interviewers can focus on these potential weaknesses during their last round of interviews.

During the interview itself, have your scorecard and the candidate’s resume in hand and go job by job asking the person to:

• Tell me about your most meaningful accomplishments in this role.

• Ask plenty of follow up questions such as “tell me more” and “why so?” that dig beneath the surface and give job candidates enough rope to prove or hang themselves.

With this approach, you will have a pretty clear picture of what someone has accomplished and not accomplished during his or her career. How does this picture compare to your scorecard? If you need to know more to answer that question, now is the time to turn to more specific interview questions. For example, my clients often want to hire people who are leaders as well as experts in their specific areas. Your review of their accomplishments will have revealed some good information. If you need more, you can ask questions such as:

• Can you tell me by name the people you would say followed you in this role? If they worked for you, how were you a leader for these people vs. just being their manager? How did you influence them? If I called them and spoke to them, how would they say you impacted them? Are you still in touch with these people? Would they consider following you to this new job?

For some more ideas on favorite interview questions, Jay Goltz wrote a good column in the New York Times recently, you can check it out here http://nyti.ms/jaygoltzinterviewquestions

Here is another helpful hint: during the interview, write down quick notes in the candidate’s own words. If you do this, you will find that when you review your notes, these “quotes” will trigger your memory and help you recall what impressed you or turned you off about a candidate.

Finally, score each person on your scorecard. Then, compare notes with other interviewers (other people invariably will catch things we missed and vice versa). You will find that the combination of asking the right questions in an interview, and comparing what you hear to a scorecard for what you need, helps you to avoid hiring mistakes and make your interviewing process more “commercial grade.”

BTW, here is an article that outlines the new LinkedIn offering and its potential future impact on leading and keeping A-players http://bit.ly/cAE7Vd

One of the reasons that I wrote How to Hire A-Players www.howtohireaplayers.com is that I see too many business owners whose mindset remains “I have a position to fill,” rather than, “I have to find the next superior performer for my team.” It’s hard to stay committed to continually finding and hiring the best people. You have to invest more time up front in defining what you want (your A-Player Profile), you have to work harder to uncover more candidates (uncovering hidden pools of talent), and you have to interview more people. When you just look at these up-front costs, it can be hard to get excited about committing to hiring more A-players.

However, when you compare the payoffs of adding a superior performer to your team vs. an acceptable performer, the up-front costs of time and effort disappear in light of the return you will get on your investment. If you’re content to surround yourself with average people, keep hiring the same way you always have. But if you’re ready to take advantage of a buyers’ labor market and systematically surround yourself with talented performers who are also a pleasure to work with, then pay the cost now to find and hire your next A-player.

When I related this to this woman she smiled and said:  It’s funny you should say that, because I just decided to get my resume out on the street and see what else is available.  Six months later she was gone, even though the senior vice president tried to keep her.  It was too late for a counter offer – this young woman was now convinced that she had to move to another company in order to move to the next level in her career.

Performance Principle: If you surround a Great Dane with a lot of Chihuahuas, your big dog is at risk.  If you employ a small number of A-players surrounded by a large group of average performers, take a hard look at the following issues:

1. Is there a clear career path for your superior performer? Does he or she see light at the end of the tunnel?  Is this A-player convinced that there are more and better challenges ahead? Maybe you recently hired someone who clearly has leadership abilities – start talking with that person about how they can further employ those skills.  Whoever the person and whatever the plan, take the time to put your arm around peoples’ shoulders, tell them that you’ve been thinking about them, buy them lunch, ask them questions, listen to their goals, and talk about their careers.  You will solve a lot of retention problems just by taking these steps.
2. Are your A-players paying an undue price by being surrounded by sub-par performers? If you’re not careful, you can burn out your A-players by making them pick up too much slack for average employees.  To some degree, your A-players will always do more than others – that’s part of what makes them so good. But you risk losing your Great Danes if you continually pile on the work the little dogs can’t handle.  Remind yourself that your first priority is ensuring that your A-players love coming to work every day.  If they don’t feel that way, what steps are you going to take to make things better?
3. Are your best performers learning from and challenged by their peers? A-players in every industry want to learn, grow, find new challenges, and attain the next level in their careers.  Peers are one of the most important catalysts for this kind of development.  If your A-players are surrounded by people with less talent and ability, they are learning less than they could if they worked with more talented peers.  One of your most important roles as a leader is to get enough quality people working together that  your team takes on a positive life of its own.  If your A-players don’t have this kind of positive peer reinforcement, it’s your responsibility to find, recruit, and hire better people and add more big dogs to your team.
4. Are you dropping your standards to fit the performance of average performers – and leaving your Big Dogs resentful and unrecognized? Managers often take their A-players for granted while spending the majority of their time trying to “fix” their weak performers.  Your best performers should be the pace setters for your team.  Set standards that challenge your Great Danes – and then let your big dogs raise the standards for everyone else.

Executives often say to me that you can’t have an entire company of A-players.  What they mean is that you can’t have a building full of Type-A people who insist on special treatment for their superior abilities.  However, I would say that for every company with this problem there are 10,000 that pin their success on the abilities of a few superior performers.   Make sure that you take care of your A-players.  Meet with them regularly.  Provide them with the resources they need to excel.  Work with them to create personalized plans for accelerating their careers.

Finally, consider how you can find and hire the next big dog for your team, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t turn a Chihuahua into a Great Dane.

Thanks,

Eric

I sat with a group of consultants waiting for a training session to begin.  The presenter, instead of clicking to his first PowerPoint slide and beginning to drone, turned to us and said, “I would like each of you to put your right hand up in the air as high as it will go.”  He then waited as we obediently raised our hands high.

“Do you have your hands raised as high as they will go?”  the speaker asked

We all nodded.

“Great!” he said.  “Now, I want you to raise your right hand a little higher.”

Every hand in the room went up at least another inch or two.

Performance Principle: Most people are not giving everything they can give to their efforts.  In some situations, 80% effort is ok – it is enough to achieve the results you need, and there is no need to kill yourself to do more.  However, A-players know when and where to stretch beyond merely acceptable performance to efforts that make them stand out from the pack and create distinctive value.  Here are a few situations where you and your people can likely stand out and create more value by stretching just a little bit higher:

Understand that business is about relationships.  You can’t get anything done if people don’t like being around you.  Human beings instinctively group themselves as “us” and “them.”  When highly effective people come into a new group, they understand that they must win the right to be heard and respected by the existing members of the group.  Without an awareness of such basic human dynamics, otherwise knowledgeable and skilled people spin their wheels.  Then they blame their lack of results on “those people” who wouldn’t listen to their great ideas.

Seek to understand rather than seek to be understood.  Some people feel they must demonstrate how knowledgeable they are by talking about their own ideas and making sure that everyone in the group understands how smart their strategies are.  However, people who are great at leading and facilitating teams don’t do this.  Instead, they emphasize listening to and understanding what others in the group want to achieve.  A-players are confident but not cocky.  They know they have the knowledge and skills to get the job done. So they put their focus on understanding what success looks like to the people around them, knowing that the easiest way to get ahead is to help others succeed.

Complete the last 20% well.  Architects will tell you that they often spend 20% of their time on the first 80% of a project – and then spend 80% of their time on the last 20% of a project.  Most people are bored of a project by the last 20%, and they want to move onto other things.  However, customers are far from bored during the last stage of projects.  That is when they get (or at least are supposed to get) the results for which they paid.  A-players understand the importance of last impressions and make sure they finish projects well.  That differentiates them from the majority of people who end projects with a whimper.  It also creates satisfied customers who become repeat clients and enthusiastic referral sources.

Think, don’t just do.  Last night I emailed my web designer Kym Costanzo a request for a small update to the website for my new book.  She emailed me back and said, “I made the update you requested but was thinking that there might be a better way to do this. Here’s my idea, let me know what you think.”  This is why I am a fan of Kym and her business (www.thewebscaper.com).  She thinks about what I ask her to do while she does it, and she often comes back to me with better ways to accomplish my goals.  Like most of you, I am busy.  I neither know nor care about the subtleties of website design and management.  I know what I want to achieve – I want someone who has smart ideas and great execution about getting there.  This is true of every job and service in every business. 

Plan, Execute, and Follow Up.  Business people spend a huge amount of time in meetings, and A-players know how to use them to move the ball forward.  I assume most people know the steps to actually get results out of meetings, but I can ensure you that a minority of people actually follow them.  Prepare by determining what you want to achieve.  Create an agenda that focuses on this goal.  Send the agenda out before the meeting, ask for changes and updates to it before the session starts.  In the meeting, follow the agenda.  Ask for commitments:  Who is going to do this?  By when?  Have someone write these commitments down and email them to all participants within 24 hours of the meeting’s completion. Hold people accountable to their commitments.  Follow these steps and watch the productivity of said meetings improve.

Conclusion:  Success is defined by spending your time on activities and efforts that have meaning and value.  Don’t try to reach a little higher on everything in your life – you won’t make progress.  Identify the priorities for your life and your business, and then push yourself and your people to reach a little higher in those areas.  You will become more valuable and stand out in the process.

This is no way to run an interview.  If you are falling into some of these traps, then consider adding some or all of the steps below to reduce hiring mistakes:

1. Determine an A-Player Profile. In my new book How to Hire A-Players, I ask the question: would you know an A-player if you met one? How so? What would tell you that an individual you currently employee or that someone you are interviewing is an A-player? I know this sounds obvious, but you would be surprised at the lack of clarity within companies about the profile of an ideal candidate. If you don’t know exactly who you are looking for, you and your team will be slow to agree upon and actively pursue the right people.

2. Look for overall patterns of accomplishment. The best way to reduce hiring mistakes in an interview is to get a very clear picture of someone’s overall pattern of accomplishments in their life and career. Then, compare that pattern to your A-Player Profile for the role. Unlike mutual funds, with people past performance is the best indicator of future results.

3. Ask initial screening questions to weed out unqualified people. For example, some roles require that applicants have certain software expertise or industry experience. If you can’t determine this from the resume, ask about these abilities early in a phone screen. If someone does not meet these minimum criteria, they are eliminated and the phone interview is over.

4. Starting with their most recent role, confirm their dates of employment, including both the month and the year. People often fudge these dates – you want to verify them.

5. For each role, ask questions specifically designed to dig into their accomplishments. The best overall question to ask is: Please tell me briefly about the top accomplishments for which you were personally responsible while employed in this role?

6. Ask follow-up questions that keep the candidate talking. These questions include: How did you do that? Why so? Please tell me how you made that happen? What were the most important steps you took to make that happen? Such open-ended questions dig beneath a candidate’s initial, pre-planned answers and programmed responses to find out what he or she really did.

7. Take verbatim notes: I have found that jotting down the word-for-word responses that people provide during interviews is helpful. When you go back and look at your notes, those verbatim quotes will help you to recall the person’s strengths and weaknesses.

8. Score each candidate: Create a scorecard for yourself using the A-Player Profile that you created. Give candidate’s a score for each key area in the profile as well as an overall score. This helps you to objectively compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of all the people you interview.

In the end, it is your job as an interviewer to gain a complete picture of the accomplishments, failures, strengths and weaknesses of each person you interview.  Then, you compare that picture to your A-player profile for the job.  By taking this approach, you uncover more about job candidates than your typical interview and determine the person who best fits the role. The end result will be fewer hiring mistakes and more A-players hired.

Eric Herrenkohl is the author of How to Hire A-Players www.howtohireaplayers.com , being published by John Wiley & Sons April 12, 2010.

Peter Drucker wrote a classic article for the Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself.  In this Performance Principles, I relate how Dwight Eisenhower failed to manage himself effectively and went from being known as a brilliant person in press conferences to being a klutz.

The Payoff – we have to know ourselves and manage ourselves in order to be effective.  As Nathaniel Branden, who has written about 20 books on self esteem, has said – no one is coming to help us.  We have to take responsibility for managing ourselves if we expect to be successful.

People who get ahead take 100% responsibility for their own lives and careers.  This does not mean that you can win by yourself.  No man (or woman) is an island.  However, each one of us has to grow up and realize that life is difficult.  Business is filled with problems.  The people who get ahead think ahead, manage themselves well, play to their own strengths and (critically) manage their own weaknesses.

Darren Hicks, CEO of Hicks Consulting, has written a great article for the EO Magazine Octane on how he learned the power of candor as a Navy SEAL and has worked hard to apply it to his business. Good stuff to read, internalize, share, and implement. http://bit.ly/navysealscandor